There's a minor flurry of outrage in Blogistan right now about this:

A judge has ordered best-selling writer and journalist Oriana Fallaci to stand trial in her native Italy on charges she defamed Islam in a recent book.

The decision angered Italy's justice minister but delighted Muslim activists, who accused Fallaci of inciting religious hatred in her 2004 work "La Forza della Ragione" (The Force of Reason)....

Righty blogger Jeff Goldstein says,

Make no mistake, people: what you are witnessing here is a carefully crafted velvet insurgency, a diminution of freedoms on the part of leftist governments and judiciaries by way of gaining control of the parameters for acceptable speech and discussion.

Apparently, Italy now has a "leftist government." News to me.

I like our First Amendment. I'm a card-carrying ACLU member, and I hope America can continue to tolerate and absorb a broad range of speech that reaches to the unspeakable and outrageous. I like the fact that we don't have religious defamation laws. (Of course, we didn't have Nazis and Fascists stomping around exercising control in this country within older people's living memory; religious defamation seems a lot more manageable here.) So I prefer a system like ours, in which an Oriana Fallaci would not be dragged into court.

I'd remind folks like Jeff Goldstein, of course, that Italy also banned a lefty Web site a couple of weeks ago for religious defamation -- specifically, for posting a picture of Pope Benedict in a Nazi uniform. I oppose that too. (Damn leftist-hating leftist government!)

But I hope those who are outraged at the treatment of Fallaci are defending her on principle, and not because of what she actually says about Islam. This is from a glowing review of The Force of Reason at National Review Online:

Fallaci has her own interpretation of the massive Islamic immigration that is rapidly changing the face of European cities. She sees it as part of the expansionism that has characterized Islam since its birth.... Fallaci uses the words of Muslim leaders to support this thesis.

In 1974, former Algerian President Houari Boumedienne said in a speech at the U.N.: "One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere to go to the northern hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory." In other words, says Fallaci, what Islamic armies have not been able to do with force in more than 1,000 years can be achieved in less than a century through high birth rates. She cites as evidence a 1975 meeting of Islamic countries in Lahore, in which they announced their project to transform the flow of Muslim immigrants in Europe in "demographic preponderance."

The "sons of Allah," as Fallaci calls them, do not make a secret of their plans. A Catholic bishop recounted that, during an interfaith meeting in Turkey, a respected Muslim cleric told the crowd: "Thanks to your democratic laws we will invade you. Thanks to our Islamic laws we will conquer you."

This is conspiratorialist claptrap. This is "Protocols of the Elders of Mecca and Medina."

One blogger claims the Boumedienne quote is as phony as the original Protocols:

Mysteriously, this quote has never been reported in the news (no hits on Factiva or Lexis-Nexis, whether in English or in French), it appears on the Internet only sourced to Ms Fallaci on weblogs, and it is not in the UN's archive. I guess this *could* mean that the liberal dhimmi conspiracy has surpressed coverage of the Muslims' true plans... however, Occam's razor would have another explanation, based on Ms Fallaci making shit up.

If you want to know more, I'll point out that after the publication of a previous Fallaci book on the same subject, George Gurley -- yes, Ann Coulter's favorite interviewer -- published an interview with Fallaci in The New York Observer. The Observer has put that interview in its pay archive, but you can still read it courtesy of -- surprise -- David Horowitz's Front Page Magazine.